KIRKUS REVIEW

Time was when bluefin tuna sold for only a dollar or two a pound. Now Japan's appetite for imported sushi has pushed that price through the roof and made tuna fishing off Cape Cod something of a cutthroat business. But that still doesn't explain why Charlie Snow's boat, Lady Pamela, should've run down a sportfisher in the fog, leaving one passenger dead and the others hopping mad--or why, when the cops find the Lady Pamela floating off Sesuit Harbor, they also find the harpooned corpse of Akito Mishima aboard. Hashimoto Takaido, Mishima's fisher-king grandfather back in Tokyo, saying he's grieved and embarrassed by the unavenged death of his grandson, hires Aristotle Socarides to look into the case. But after breaking Charlie's alibi--he could well have been aboard Lady Pamela after all--Soc finds the investigation getting away from him in a series of surprises. (At least he's surprised.) His white-haired client isn't exactly what he's supposed to be; the police inspector sent over from Tokyo to work the case turns out to be a Yiddish-spouting cowboy (with a Polish-Inuit girlfriend); and the obligatory rivalry among tuna fishers--very smartly dished up by Kemprecos--doesn't begin to explain the reason Akito Mishima died. The tidy, predictable ending to Soc's sixth (The Mayflower Murder, 1996, etc.) only confirms the general sense that the Yakuza are a lot more menacing--a lot more interesting, even--on their home turf.

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